1949 was Hollywood’s year of the racial message movie. In May, Intruder In The Dust told the story of a Black man falsely accused of murdering a white man. July and September saw the release of Lost Boundaries and Pinky—two stories about the travails of light-skinned Black people passing as white. And in November, there was Home Of The Brave, which followed a Black soldier’s struggles against racism during WWII. These films were made with good intentions. Some still seem progressive today; others decidedly less so. But none could boast what the next major racial message movie, released in August of 1950, had working in its favor: The debut of Sidney Poitier.
In No Way Out—directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who co-wrote it with Lesser Samuels—Luther Brooks (Poitier) has just become the first Black man at his hospital to qualify as a doctor. On his first shift after qualifying, though, he has the misfortune to run into the Biddle brothers. Ray (Richard Widmark) and Johnny Biddle (Dick Paxton), have been shot by the police after they were caught robbing a store. Ray is more or less okay, but Johnny appears significantly more unwell than he should be after a superficial gunshot wound. Luther spots this discrepancy, and attempts a spinal tap to alleviate the apparent pressure on his brain. In the process, Johnny dies. Ray—a spitting, seething racist, who has been jeering at Luther the whole time he’s been attempting to save his brother—is convinced that Luther purposely killed him. Luther did not, but nevertheless is not entirely sure that he made the right medical decision.
An autopsy would answer the question, but that requires consent that Ray is not inclined to give. He doesn’t trust the medical establishment to not cover up for their own. Besides, the air of uncertainty helps his malignant cause—soon, from his bed on the hospital prison ward, he has fomented a race riot. Luther must clear his name, perhaps with the reluctant help of Johnny’s widow Edie (Linda Darnell), who’s torn between her hatred of Ray and her own bigotry.
Poitier didn’t actually receive star billing here; that wouldn’t come until the other end of the ’50s. Still, though No Way Out sidelines him for a large portion of the middle act, it’s undeniably his movie. As would so often be the case over the following years, the way Poitier tamps down his character’s justified anger in the face of unjustified hatred, plowing forward with his job despite a racist trying desperately to stop him, represents the height of dignity.
Yet Poitier was only 22 when he shot No Way Out, and he looked it. The mantles of “hero” and “icon” were not yet on his shoulders. He was just a regular young actor, trying to make it in a business inhospitable to people who looked like him. While he is clearly already in possession of the charisma and gravitas that made him such a powerhouse, there’s a touching, youthful vulnerability to Poitier’s first film performance that would be quick to evaporate in later roles. That vulnerability added dimension to Luther’s internal conflict, as well as his external one. Gertrude Gipson’s contemporary review for African-American paper The California Eagle quoted his co-star Widmark as saying, “Poitier puts so much feeling into his intonation and expression that I’m just going to look like a ranting idiot!”
Widmark was just three years into his own Hollywood career when he made No Way Out. He was a phenomenal actor, capable of playing characters all across the morality spectrum, but he’d be particularly known for his baddies; in his debut movie, 1947’s Kiss Of Death, he notoriously threw a woman in a wheelchair down the stairs. It’s saying something then, that Ray Biddle was among the worst of Widmark’s villains, the noxiousness of his racism manifesting in a vicious ferality still jarring to watch.
Widmark and Poitier became good friends in real life, and starred in two more movies together the following decade. But despite their offscreen warmth, the times where they face off one-on-one are where No Way Out feels at its most raw and dangerous, even more so than in the race riot setpiece (in which neither actor features). Their mutual hatred carries with it an electric, visceral combustibility.
Other than Widmark, Poitier has the most scenes opposite Stephen McNally as Dr. Wharton, who takes Luther under his wing. McNally was one of the era’s blandest leading men; that Poitier so often has to cede him the spotlight during their scenes together is one of the movie’s weakest points. “I’m pro-good doctor: Black, white, or polka dot!” Dr. Wharton says in an early heated discussion. While his self-satisfied color-blindness is certainly a better treatment than Luther receives at the hands of many white people, it comes at a cost. He tries to console Luther by saying that, “Every time anybody dies in a country hospital somebody yells murder.” “But it’s not the same when they yell it at me,” Luther replies. Wharton’s refusal to understand that, and his insistence on keeping Luther on the prison ward with the racist who wants to kill him, puts the young doctor in terrible jeopardy.
As with the era’s other racial message movies, No Way Out has its flaws. Luther’s sidelining during the middle act is strange, especially considering that it means he comes to a big decision as to how to save himself completely offscreen. And Luther is a touch more passive than the majority of Poitier’s later leads would be. When Luther asks to stay with Wharton after passing his exams, rather than move on alongside the rest of the newly qualified doctors, he says, “I think I’ll need a little more time than the others.” Melissa Anderson in the Village Voice called Luther’s reasoning simply “a calm, honest assessment” of his unique situation. Nonetheless, when paired with the moment where Wharton laughingly recounts that Luther fears he’s only has gotten where he has because his instructors are scared to be seen as prejudiced, these statements of insecurity skirt close to undermining his evident skill.
Ray Biddle spends the whole movie spewing racist bile, but towards the end of the film, one piece of invective is particularly telling: “‘Poor little n—- kids, love the little n—- kids.’ Who loved me?” His certainty that Luther’s success has come at a personal detriment to him invokes the persistent entitlement still found today in things like the Trumpian backlash against DEI initiatives. The false idea that something has been taken from white people, and given to Black people, is what makes Ray’s brand of racism so vicious and snarling, but there are subtler types on display here to—all the way down to the unspoken yet evident skepticism of the guards on the prison ward when Luther turns up for his first shift as a doctor (which in turn is evocative of the MAGA brouhaha around Black pilots). It’s striking, and more than a little depressing, how predictive this 75-year-old movie was of the current racial discourse.
And how predictive of the rest of Poitier’s career it would be. After maintaining his moral and professional honor (“I can’t kill a man just because he hates me,” Luther says), he ends No Way Out with an immortal line, one that Poitier’s characters could have gone on to say in pretty much every one of his future films: “Don’t cry, white boy, you’re gonna live.”
But Poitier wasn’t the only Black acting legend whose career was launched by the prescient No Way Out. It was also Ossie Davis’ big-screen debut, and the first of many times he’d appear alongside his real-life wife Ruby Dee. The two played Luther’s sister and brother-in-law, Connie and John. This is another aspect that makes No Way Out stand out in Poitier’s early filmography: It takes the time to explore his character’s home life, to a deeper extent than any of his movies up until 1957’s Edge Of The City (there, Poitier and Dee would be spouses rather than siblings). Luther lives with his mother (Maude Simmons), his wife Cora (Mildred Joanne Smith in her sole film role), Connie, and John. No Way Out contrasts the Brooks’ loving, warm, hard-working family against the Biddles’ cruel, criminal one in a move as progressive as anything else in the film. In perhaps the most moving scene, an exhausted Luther falls asleep on Cora’s lap, as she recounts all that the couple have gone through to get where they are today. “We’re tired, but we’re here, honey,” she says. “We can be happy. We’ve got a right to be.”
Black family life was still an incredible rarity onscreen in 1950—even in Lost Boundaries, one in that 1949 batch of racial message movies, the Black family passing as white were played by white actors (as was the case in Pinky). Indeed, following so closely on the heels of those 1949 films is the reason many assigned to No Way Out‘s underwhelming box office; per Variety, it was, “the usual fate of a tail-ender in a cycle.” But another factor in the film’s financial disappointment was the censorious treatment it received all over the country. Several Black organizations worried that Biddle’s encyclopedia of racial slurs might give his fellow bigots vocabulary hints. Police were worried the race riot scenes would reignite ever-broiling tensions in their own communities. A cut version was shown in several cities, and it was banned altogether in Chicago, until several particularly inflammatory minutes around the riot scenes were excised. Unsurprisingly, it was not shown at all in the South. The film’s politics, and Poitier’s own, meant that it’d take seven years for him to get such a significant part again, thanks to his unofficial blacklisting. The early ’50s were the peak of McCarthyism; Poitier wouldn’t sign any loyalty oaths, and continued to socialize with actor-activists like Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, whom Joseph McCarthy abhorred.
No Way Out should have been a springboard for Poitier, but after a significant yet supporting role in 1951’s Cry, The Beloved Country, he spent the next few years languishing in the ensembles of Budd Boetticher war drama The Red Ball Express and Harlem Globetrotters origin story Go, Man, Go. His appearance as a high school student (despite being 27) in 1955 megahit Blackboard Jungle finally stuck him on the right trajectory, and from then on, his roles got bigger. Their treatment of race, however, was not always as thoughtful as No Way Out—like Something Of Value, Mark Of The Hawk, and Virgin Island, which were all, to varying degrees, pro-colonialism.
Then of course, there’s Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner. Though it was released 17 years after No Way Out, it’s striking how much clunkier and less racially nuanced it is. In the 1967 film, Poitier also plays a doctor, John Prentice, who falls in love with the white Joanna Drayton (Katherine Houghton). The drama revolves around the couple seeking her parents’ (Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy) blessing to get married.
John Prentice is an almost farcically ideal man—kind, handsome, charming, patient, with a good job and even better prospects. He’s in the process of trying to launch a medical program which could save a million lives a year. Joanna, meanwhile, has two characteristics: she is pretty and cheerfully oblivious. Clearly, she’s the one unworthy of him, though you’d never know it from the way the action plays out. In No Way Out, Wharton’s “I don’t see color” naivety is proven by the plot to be harmful; in Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Joanna’s is considered simply admirable.
In the former movie, Luther tries to stop his friend, the hospital’s elevator operator Lefty (Dots Johnson), from joining in the upcoming race riots, insisting that it would make him just as bad as the Biddle brothers. “Ain’t that a lot asking for us to be better than them, when we get killed trying to prove we’re as good?” Lefty responds. This is both a fair question, and a fascinating meta-prediction of all the times in the future where Poitier would be criticized for playing idealized Black men like Dr. John Prentice. Fittingly, for the general backwardness of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Joanna’s family maid Tillie (Isabel Sanford) is furious at him for precisely the opposite reason as Lefty: “I don’t care to see a member of my own race getting above himself.”
At the 1968 Oscars, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner battled it out with another Poitier film, In The Heat Of The Night, in which he’s a Northern police officer trying to solve a murder in a racist Southern town. That movie was far more in line with No Way Out in terms of its willingness to engage with the widespread brutality of racism, and the psychic toll it takes on Poitier’s character, who just wanted to do his job.
Both films won statues, but In The Heat Of The Night dominated, and marked the end of an era for both Poitier and racial message movies. From then on, Poitier’s filmography became far less weighted towards teaching white people about racism and broadened considerably, exploring his eternally underrated comedic chops and even venturing into action heroism. So much lay ahead for Poitier and his career when No Way Out was released—a wide variety of roles, a stint behind the camera, an impact over decades that would make him into an icon. Yet, seeing the texture he gave to Dr. Luther Brooks, the quiet power and inarguable presence he brought to a character even more passive than most he’d go on to play, it’s clear how much was already there from the start. And, even more than the films that solidified his fame, the film that launched Poitier still has plenty to say.
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